1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information retrieval systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods for clustering search results by address and/or telephone number.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly. Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web documents in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web documents. Web documents that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user.
Some web documents may be of particular interest to users that reside in certain geographical areas. For example, web documents associated with local businesses or organizations may be of most relevance to individuals located in the geographical area of the local businesses/organizations.
When a user desires information regarding a type of business (e.g., a restaurant, a hardware store, a pharmacy, etc.) within a certain geographical area, the user may provide one or more keywords associated with the business type and the geographical area to a search engine. The search engine returns search results that include web documents associated with the business type.
One problem with these search results is that the search results typically will not include web documents associated with businesses or organizations outside the geographical area identified by the user, even if these businesses or organizations are located in an area geographically close (or next) to the geographical area identified by the user. Another problem with these search results is that the search results typically include more than one, and oftentimes many, web documents associated with the same business location, possibly requiring the user to peruse many web documents in the search results that are irrelevant to the business of interest before locating all of the web documents associated with the business of interest.
As a result, there is a need for systems and methods for organizing search results in a manner that is meaningful to users, given that there are a set number of unique locations in the world and anywhere between zero and hundreds of web documents that describe each location.